Kim Jong Un rang in the New Year with an unsettling announcement: that North Korea was perfecting the design of an intercontinental ballistic missile, potentially posing a dire threat to the United States and its allies. President-elect Donald Trump was quick to respond with a pair of cryptic tweets that seemed to warn North Korea, or China, or both. His first: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the US. It won’t happen!” Followed by: “China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won’t help with North Korea. Nice!”

Sometime in the past year, the small tribe of North Korea-watchers has watched with alarm as Pyongyang has come closer of realizing its dream of a nuclear weapon that could hit U.S. shores. A swirl of tests this year showed the country making significant progress in its medium-range missile program and advancing toward larger goals. But just how scared should we be? And will Kim test President Trump with his first foreign policy crisis, as many national security experts expect?

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Not so fast, says Joshua Pollack, the editor of the Nonproliferation Review and senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. It’s possible that North Korea’s enigmatic leader was, in fact, carefully moderating his language and signaling a willingness to go to deal with a new American administration. Of course, even if Kim is trying to cool it, an unpredictable Trump administration still worries Pollack for a number of reasons: rising U.S.-China tensions, a South Korea that wants nukes of its own and a region simmering with submerged tensions.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Excerpts:

POLITICO Magazine: So after that tweet from Trump, a lot of people are predicting that North Korea will somehow provoke the first overseas crisis of Trump’s presidency. How do you think that might play out?

Joshua Pollack: I don't know that they’re intent on doing that. I got a very different message from reading Kim Jong Un’s New Year’s speech, and I thought he was actually intent on keeping his powder dry and waiting to see what moves the new administration makes and perhaps any new South Korean government that will come along. So, I’m not at all sure that there will be any such crisis. There was barely any movement on these issues during the Obama presidency. So, I could imagine something where the North Koreans could overplay their hand and, as a result, get nowhere. If they play it cool, then they might allow Trump an opening if he’s interested in pursuing one.

POLITICO: An opening to do what?

Pollack: To reach a new understanding. I think [Kim] said that in 2016 they completed the preparations for a test launch, or words to that effect. And he did not say, contrary to some headlines, that they’re planning one any time soon. So, you know, when you speak of preparations, that implies you will act, but he didn't actually say that. He certainly did not promise it, and he could have. So, given that the speech overall was about big economic accomplishments this year, and was describing all of the military activities as accomplished or done, it made it sound like they checked a box.

He also said that they would continue to strengthen their nuclear forces as long as the United States threatened them with nuclear weapons and with the joint exercises with the South Koreans that take place twice every year, and there he did not specifically say that they would undertake a nuclear test. He could have, but he was vague, and he sort of left it open. So, it seemed like he was putting down some markers about what might justify these activities and was perhaps putting them on the negotiating table.

It’s difficult to make these inferences, but since his language was relatively muted and restrained compared to what it has been before and the overall focus of the speech was about basically overhauling the economy, I think it signaled that the door is open a crack. He did not refer openly to the new administration. The North Korean media has said very little about Trump, but simply because they are not eager to negotiate with Obama doesn't mean that they wouldn't be interested in negotiating with Trump, in my view.That’s why I see an opportunity there. There just wasn’t a whole lot of menace and saber-rattling.

POLITICO: Do you think it reflects any kind of real change in their ambitions?

Pollack: No. I mean, why would it? They have a longstanding approach which they’ve spelled out for us repeatedly, which is they want us to abandon what they call “the hostile policy.” They want us basically--they see themselves as being on a list of enemies, you know, an impression you might get from George W. Bush's “Axis of Evil” speech, and they want off of it. They want us to treat them more like a peer, knowing that countries that have nuclear weapons tend not to mess with each other. So, they’re looking for ways to improve the situation to deter an attack that they always are afraid might be coming from the United States and South Korea.

POLITICO: Can North Korea reach the United States with a nuke now?

Pollack: It could. They could take one of their space launchers, they could put a nuke on it, and they could send it here, but that's not a great way to do it. I mean, look, they got the space launcher working. The last two times they used it, it worked. If they put a nuke on it instead of a satellite, it could get here. I don’t doubt that. It’s just that that thing is not a great ICBM. You can't set it up—it’s not mobile. You can’t set it up anywhere and it takes a little while to set up. A space launcher can work as an ICBM; it’s just not ideal for these purposes. But, in a pinch, could they send a nuke here? Yeah.

POLITICO: How could we stop them from using it?

Pollack: Threatening to retaliate. We have a very powerful nuclear arsenal and if they ever used one against us, we would smash them. We would smash their entire country.

Pollack: Well, I think that a more fruitful approach would be to aim a little lower. Instead of demanding that they reconfirm their commitment to denuclearization, which they gave in 2005 at the Six-Party Talks in Beijing—we should reaffirm that, but we don’t need to rapidly get to that point—there are definitely things we can do that would lower the temperature and improve the security situation for everyone, such as getting them to renew their moratorium on testing missiles. We could seek that type of an agreement again, maybe with some other features. The North Koreans might ask for some things on security and not just aid. They might ask for relaxation of some sanctions. So yeah, loosening sanctions but not eliminating them, maybe making some changes in military posture on the peninsula or military activities without getting rid of them, but just making some modifications.

POLITICO: Sen. Lindsey Graham is pushing Congress to authorize the use of force to take out North Korea's ICBM program. Is that a good idea or a bad idea?

Pollack: I don’t think that’s a good idea. They have nuclear weapons and they feel we're out to get them and this would—I mean, this is what we did before Iraq, did before Afghanistan. They would see that as, you know, we’re passing a death sentence on the regime. I guess it would matter what is in the authorization bill; the exact language might matter. But we’re not going to disarm them by force, and, you know, the last thing we would really need to do is kick off Korean War II against a nuclear-armed adversary. I'm sorry, that's just a bad idea.

POLITICO: What worries you the most about Trump in North Korea? What do you think is the worst that could happen?

Pollack: Oh, gosh. I worry about breaking the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Donald Trump does not show a heck of a lot of concern for the views of most of our allies. We used to keep nuclear weapons with short-range delivery systems in South Korea between 1958 and 1992. There’s been noise [within South Korea] about returning them in response to North Korea’s nuclear tests, and if we won't do that, then dropping out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and getting their own bomb, which is something they contemplated in the ‘70s before they were in the treaty. They had a program and the United States persuaded them not to move ahead with it. I think it would be devastating to the South Korean economy to leave the NPT, devastating to their prestige and their standing in the world. This is something like the seventh or eighth largest economy in the world. They’re very sensitive to their economic ties with other countries.

POLITICO: So, do you think that will be the result of a specific action by Trump?

Pollack: Rhetoric alone is not going to do that. Seoul is right up next to the Demilitarized Zone [the buffer zone between South Korea and North Korea created at the end of the Korean War]. I mean, it has a big, big bullseye painted on it and half the country lives there, 25 million out of 50 million people live in the immediate Seoul area. I mean, that is the beating heart of the country and you don't endanger that. You don’t go blowing stuff up in North Korea and risking a war that could devastate South Korea and set it back decades. You just don’t. And that’s one way the relationship could break down--if the United States decided to bomb North Korea nuclear facilities and start hunting their missiles and so on. But another thing is if we sort of started walking away from the alliance in the view of the South Koreans, that could also convince them that they need to look out for themselves. And so, either of those extremes is a danger and we've always managed to navigate between them.

Politico: Trump seems to think he can sort of poke China into getting tougher on Kim. Do you think Trump will be able to do that?

Pollack: How I spin our approach is that we’re going to sanction the North Koreans until they decide that their nuclear program is more of a threat to their survival than a benefit. Well, you know, if we were to actually get to that point, it would also be threatening to the Chinese, because they would have to deal with consequences of any such collapse and they would not necessarily like the outcome. It would not necessarily be a net gain for their security, because they don’t trust the United States. China talks a lot about an American policy of encircling China, and I think they worry about losing North Korea as a buffer. Even though the North Koreans are an immense pain in the neck for them, they really are “frenemies.” That means they don’t want to lose them.

And the question for South Korea always has been, after unification [of Korea, on South Korean terms], what kind of relationship it has with the United States—and I think that the Chinese would worry that South Korea would want to keep America there to balance against China, and that America would want to stay there to sort of keep a finger in China's eye so it doesn't get any big ideas about running the region in America's absence. So, there are some real limits that we come up against, because China and America have a big deficit in trust.

POLITICO: What do you think is the biggest thing people don't understand about Kim Jong Un?

Pollack: He’s not crazy. He’s not a clown. He’s not a kid. He’s not inexperienced. He’s not a joke. He’s not a puppet. And he’s now been in power five years. That's more than an American presidential term. So, it's not sensible to call him inexperienced anymore.

POLITICO: Trump once tweeted: “Dennis Rodman would do a better job than the current Ambassador to North Korea. His relationship with Kim Jong-un was amazing to see.” What are your thoughts on that?

Pollack: We don’t have an ambassador to North Korea. [Laughing] So, strictly speaking, that’s true. Wow. Well, you know, I mean, there's a learning curve. Trump is not a foreign affairs professional, and the reference to an ambassador to North Korea kind of gives that away. But I think the Rodman visits [to North Korea] partly reflected Kim Jong Un’s own interests. He’s into basketball, clearly. So, I could envision more like that. It probably wouldn’t involve Rodman, but, you know, there could be another go at that.